A year back I might actually have agreed that Raj Thackeray’s goons had a point in protesting the use of the word “Bombay” in a Hindi movie, while referring to India’s commercial capital. I believed that the Bombay of my childhood, a beautiful, tolerant, cosmopolitan city by the sea, had in any case vanished. Every time I returned to the city I searched in vain for many of the old landmarks, only to be confronted by a disturbing reality which had no connection with the past.

For instance, the gracious Victorian villas on New Marine Lines, a sleepy, shady lane behind Churchgate station where I grew up, have disappeared. Now when you enter the street during office hours you are overwhelmed by the stench of rotting garbage, teeming humanity, cars honking away and traffic jams. All the houses have long since been pulled down for high-rise offices, though adequate civic amenities are totally absent.

All cities change with time. One cannot continue to dwell in the past. The difference is that the rapid metamorphosis of Bombay altered not just its physical exterior but corroded its soul. The Shiv Sena and others of its ilk, determinedly hammered away at the cosmopolitan, secular character of the city, in a bid to assert the primacy of Maharashtrians. Non-Maharashtrians were all lumped together as “outsiders”. The irony is that the Marathi-speakers, who come from other parts of Maharashtra state and who now claim to be the true inheritors of the city, are themselves carpet-baggers.

... contd.